


Let Me In and Feed Me

by psyche_girl



Series: I Need a Hero [1]
Category: Hannibal (TV), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: (No it's not Hannibal), Fix-It, Gen, Magically appearing sky-dogs, Someone Helps Will Graham, The power of friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-24
Updated: 2018-10-24
Packaged: 2019-08-06 17:33:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16392143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psyche_girl/pseuds/psyche_girl
Summary: Honestly, Will's newest stray dog turning into an escaped murderer was probably the most normal thing about this.





	Let Me In and Feed Me

Will found the dog in the middle of his front lawn.

This wasn’t unusual. Nor was the fact that the dog was gone one second and there the next, blurring into existence as if stepping through a tattered veil that had just opened in the sky. Will was used to hallucinating; grey sky-veils that spat up dogs were pretty benign, in the grand scheme of things.

What _was_ unusual was that before he could introduce himself and/or determine whether his hallucinations had progressed to tactile as well as audiovisual, the dog blinked, shivered, and turned into a naked man.

“Er. Hi,” said the naked man, in a sheepish-sounding British accent. “Any chance I could borrow some clothes?”

\--

Will got him clothes. When it turned out the man also didn’t have any shoes, he got some of those too, and a glass of water, and a map. The man was surprised and distressed by the map, since he apparently hadn’t expected to be in America (“We were in the Ministry, I was fighting-”) and _more_ surprised and distressed by Will’s refrigerator.

“I’m really sorry about this,” said the strange man. He was looking at Will like he thought Will ought to be panicking. Will probably should have been panicking, but mostly he was confused, because it had been a good half hour and so far this hallucination had neither tried to kill him nor impaled itself horribly on anything nor started sprouting black feathers. “I honestly had no idea you were a Muggle.”

“Okay,” Will said.

“You’re not crazy,” said the hallucination, which was the most obvious lie yet. “I’m a wizard, which means I can do magic, and an Animagus, which means I can turn into a dog.”

“Okay.”

“I was in the middle of a battle, and I fell through an arch which sent me to…America? Are you American? To wherever this is.”

“Okay.”

The apparently-wizard eyed Will’s amiable expression with suspicion.

“…You don’t believe me.”

“Well,” Will said, in the interest of fairness, “I don’t _not_ believe you.”

“I haven’t got my wand on me, but once I figure out where I am, and get in touch with Ha- with my people, I can prove it?”

“Okay.”

The man sighed, and visibly gave up. After a few seconds, he started drumming his fingers on the table.

“You, er…don’t remember me from the telly, or anything, do you?”

“No.”

“Oh. Good. Well. Um. Good.” More finger-drumming. “I suppose, in case you _do_ recognize me, I should probably say- My name is Sirius Black. I’m an escaped murderer. Well, really I’m innocent, but they’ve not gotten around to getting me a pardon yet.”

“Okay.”

“…You’re not frightened of me?”

Will shrugged. Honestly, his new dog turning into a murderer was probably the most normal thing about this. “Usually my hallucinations don’t pretend they’re innocent.”

“Oh. Er. Well. You don’t need to be frightened of me.” There was a long, heavy pause. “Er, what do you mean, hallucinations?”

Will shrugged again, then, because he felt like it, reached out and ruffled his hallucination’s hair. That was so _weird_ – he’d never been able to touch a hallucination before. And it was definitely human hair, not fur. The tactile aspect was _fascinating_.

“I suppose you must mean they’re escalating. I’ve never talked about my own insanity with someone in my head before this.”

“…Right. Well, even if you don’t think _I’m_ real, do you mind if I borrow your actually real couch for the night? And some food? I can pay you back for that and the clothes as soon as I get back home.”

“Okay.”

A spot on the couch, some food and water and a bath and an old set of clothes to sleep in was what most of his stray dogs ended up with, anyway. Will didn’t see any reason he should do any less for this dog just because it occasionally turned into a vivid hallucination of a magic British criminal named Sirius.

“You’ll see,” promised Sirius. “Once I get home, everything’ll be all right.”

\--

Sirius could not get back home.

\--

Will had never felt brave enough to discuss his nightmares with another human besides Hannibal, but, well – Sirius wasn’t precisely human, was he? Sirius was a hallucination, currently eating kibble.

And he got the feeling that Hannibal would say not apologizing was rude, even if it was just to a figament of his imagination. Hannibal encouraged Will to talk to the voices in his head.

“Didn’t that bother you, last night?”

“Didn’t what bother me?”

“The nightmares.”

“What nightmares?”

Will stared at Sirius, who had gone four-legged and had both ears lowered shiftily. Sirius stared back.

“I wake up screaming at night, sometimes.”

“Oh,” said a suddenly jeans-wearing Sirius, in apparent relief. “I thought you meant _my_ screaming. It’s fine, I got used to that sort of thing in Azkaban. Honestly, these days, I find it comforting.”

Will scratched his ears in gratitude, and even went so far as to throw the ball for Sirius the next time they both happened to be awake at 2AM, and give Sirius an extra serving of kibble when he came home to find the bathroom and the kitchen and the front hall closets had all been scrubbed and organized.

\--

Alana sent an appraising look around his living room as she stepped through the door.

“Something’s different in here.”

“It’s probably the escaped convict living in my garage,” Will replied. "He does the dishes sometimes."

By the time he realized what he’d said, she was already laughing.

\--

As normal as Sirius might find nightmares, however, he turned out to find sleepwalking deeply disturbing.

“Look,” Sirius said, after the third time Will woke him up in the middle of the night, screaming and sleepwalking and dripping with sweat. “Mate, I don’t know what kind of medicine Muggles practice, but if you were in my world, we’d already be halfway to St Mungo’s. How do I get you to a healer?”

“You call 911,” Will mumbled, blearily rubbing at his forehead. He felt disgusting – raw and sweaty and horrible. If anyone but a dog had been talking to him, he’d probably be humiliated. “Or go to the ER.”

“Right,” said Sirius grimly, and hit Will in the face with a pair of jeans. “Get some clothes on, we’re going.”

“It’s late, I don’t want to bother anybody. I can get checked out in the morning, I-”

“No,” said Sirius, giving him a look that Will was more used to giving his dogs than getting from them. “We’re going right now.”

And then he went and fetched the blue leash and sat by the door until Will came and picked up the other end.

\--

“So,” Will said, some seven hours later, standing dazedly in the E.R. lobby with Sirius. “Looks like I’m not crazy.”

He wondered if it was appropriate to describe a dog’s expression as a “bitchface”.

“I wonder if you’ll still be able to turn into a wizard when the encephalitis is cured,” Will wondered aloud, instead of voicing this. Sirius huffed, and body-checked Will back into the waiting room seats.

\--

Several long and very loud visiting hours later, while Alana was in the bathroom, Sirius stood up to drag Will by the leash on a walk around the hospital. They made it quite a few hallways before Sirius lead them into an empty exam room, turned around three times sniffing suspiciously, and turned human again.

“Look, mate. I don’t want to bring this up, especially while you’re going through a tough time already. But I was a…well, the wizard equivalent of a cop once in my old life, and I’ve had some friends who went bad. And it strikes me as _incredibly_ suspicious that neither of your doctor friends bothered to try getting you to a muggle Healer before this.”

“They didn’t know what was wrong with me,” Will pointed out. “Everyone thought I was crazy. _I_ thought I was crazy. Medically speaking, I’m still crazy. I’m talking to a dog that may or may not be a hallucination.”

“Well, you can just wait until the ER medicine Healers are done to be sure of that, can’t you?” Sirius pointed out impatiently. “You’re right this probably isn’t the best time to talk about this. I just… I get that they’re your friends and you trust them. But I’d known you for about four hours before I knew something was wrong with you, and I’m not a Healer. _These_ Healers took forty-five minutes to figure out what was wrong. That says to me that your friends are either really bad Healers, or really bad friends.”

Will found this disturbing, mostly because he couldn’t think of any way to disagree. And he wasn’t sure which possibility – Hannibal and Alana not caring about him, or Hannibal and Alana being incompetent – was more upsetting.

“Hannibal and Alana both specialize in psychiatry,” he pointed out, after a long minute of wrestling with this. When Sirius just stared back blankly, he explained “that means they do a different sort of medicine. Er, Healing.”

“Well, you’d know better than I would.” Sirius still looked dubious. Will felt angry, and confused, and the light in the exam room was making his head hurt. “But I’ll bring it up again later.”

“Later, you might only be able to bark,” Will pointed out, but Sirius had already turned four-legged again, and didn’t answer.

\--

Sirius could, in fact, still turn into a human after Will returned from the hospital.

“Told you,” he said agreeably, when he caught Will staring. “Want to take a photograph? We can frame it next to your discharge notice: proof you’re not crazy.”

“You’re a human,” Will said, still trying to wrap his head around this. Many things that he had blithely accepted about Sirius while he was out of his mind with fever, and then out of his mind with antibiotics and antipsychotics, were suddenly striking him as very strange. Not least of which- “You’re a _magic_ human?”

“We prefer the term wizard. And I told you, I can’t do much magic, I left my wand in another dimension.”

“You’re an _interdimensional criminal magic dog-human_ ,” Will said, and had to sit down.

“I can pour you a whisky, if you need one,” said Sirius cheerfully. “Did you know, this stuff tastes much better when it’s not served on fire? I’d no idea Muggle alcohol was so superior.”

“Are you a werewolf?”

“No. My best friend was, though. Is. Not that I’m ever going to see him again.” Sirius gave a long, mournful, dog-whuffle sigh.

“Right. Because, while fighting your psycho cousin you fell through a magic portal-”

“-Veil of Death-”

“-inside a secret branch of the British government, and now you’re in a different universe.”

“Yep. Pretty much.”

Will blinked.

“Wow,” he managed. “Your life might actually be weirder than mine.”

Sirius eyed the bottle of whiskey, then Will, contemplatively. “Hey. Want to take shots for every time life’s fucked us over?”

…That sounded like a _fantastic_ idea.

\--

Sirius, it quickly became clear, was not nearly as high-functioning an alcoholic as Will.

Or possibly it was that, when Will had made the mistake of bringing up their families, Sirius felt compelled to take five shots at once. Admittedly, his cousin _had_ tried to kill him, but considering that getting locked up with brain-eating demons and wrongfully accused of mass murder had only been worth two shots, it gave Will an uneasy feeling.

Either way, Sirius was now _wasted_.

“I just- he looked _so much_ like James,” Sirius moaned, voice muffled by the fuzz of Will’s couch. Will wondered if he should tell Sirius his leg was kicking, kind of like Sirius’s dog-shape would. “ _So_ much. And he was a good kid, y’know? An’ now I can’t protect him an’ he’s probably dead.”

“Social Services – that’s part of our government – won’t let me see Abigail,” Will confessed.

“Bloody government wouldn’ let me see Harry, either. Not even as Padfoot. I’m a _good_ Padfoot.” Sirius’s sad-eyes were so obviously puppyish, Will couldn’t stop himself from reaching out to ruffle his hair.

“Yes, you are.”

This was weird. This was _so_ weird. Sirius was a grown human, and Will normally _hated_ humans (well, most humans – he’d _thought_ he didn’t hate Hannibal or Alana, but since the diagnosis-)

But Sirius was also his dog.

“This is crazy,” Will marveled, staring up at his leaky ceiling. Since he’d started medication, the shitty condition of his house had started to bother him more. Especially since it meant he and Sirius were both sitting in damp cushions. “You’re crazy. _I’m_ crazy. You shouldn’t exist.”

“Y’r not crazy! Hospital _said_.” Jesus, Sirius even _whined_ like a dog.

“Right.” Will tried, and failed, to inject some conviction into his voice. “Right. I’m not crazy.”

“An’ yr friends are _shit_. Just. Shit, man. Fuck them. _Fuck_ shit friends. Fuck _Peter_ -”

“Okay! Time to stop now,” Will staggered upright, on legs that were far less steady than they’d been a bottle and a half of whisky ago, just in time to stop Sirius’s shaky-fingered grab for the bottle. Even out of his mind with encephalitis and convinced he was hallucinating, Will had still figured out quickly that it was a bad idea to let Sirius talk about Peter. He also (despite the two legs and clothes) felt an obligation not to let his newest dog die of alcohol poisoning. “Let’s get you to bed, huh?”

Sirius blinked. “But I thought you didn’t want me to sleep in your bed?”

“…Uh.”

Will tried frantically to remember if normal people found sharing beds with their human friends awkward, then gave up. The sofa was right under one of the worst leaks, anyway, and probably soaked with rain already, and every part of him rebelled against letting a human guest sleep in the kennel.

“It’s fine.”

“Oh. Good.” Sirius _beamed_. Will could practically see his tongue lolling.

Then he raced upstairs, turned around three times, wobbled, nearly hit his head on the sideboard, and curled up on top of Will’s feet.

Will stared balefully at the large, furry lump of evidence that he _wasn’t_ crazy, and resigned himself to a long morning of getting dog hair off the sheets.


End file.
